That's true for many DBs, but how much maintenance did you have to perform on the dozens of SQLite databases living in your phone and your $HOME?
It may not be me, but someone has to maintain those databases unless the software that uses it stops changing. Where curl has to maintain compatibility with every call to curl, I would wager that sqlite has to maintain compatibility with a larger surface area of APIs.
HTTP regularly changes. 2 and 3 are very big enhancements for some use cases.